This post is a direct response to Victoria Didilica’s 08/05/2013 featured blog post on LinkedIn entitled Is It A Case of "There are No Jobs” Or Is It That “There Are No Good Applicants?” While my post examines the relevant items about recent graduate employment difficulties, the market, and the Career Services industry as indicated by so many of the commenters on Ms. Didilica’s entry; it does refer to at least one commenter by name (Fred Cosgrove). I recommend that readers follow the link and familiarize themselves with the content attached to the original post for a broader understanding of my assertions below. The content of my post may also be useful to similar LinkedIn threads like Martin Kral's Who's Responsibility Is It Anyway?

THE PAST RARELY MEETS THE PRESENT

Networking and building a personal pitch have always been heavy go-to elements of the Career Development (Career Services) industry, going back to before teaching these practices could even be considered a viable industry. This is not without reason, as year after year, in the case of networking, regardless of which source one most trusts, the number of positions landed through some use of networking technique fluctuates little from staggeringly high percentages. Such speaks to even blog commenter, Mr. Cosgrove’s loved one (I am sorry for your loss) having obtained employment by simply asking, even during the worst economic period in modern times. Asking is networking in its most basic form.
Today, though, even in a tone-setting Mecca of employment like New York City, while asking ABOUT jobs remains key, directly asking FOR a job is a near impossible solution that yields positive results only anecdotally. The major job-seeking differences between The Great Depression and this century are many and not the least of them is the lack of a realistic, face-to-face place to “walk up” and make such a query. Even if folks during The Depression had to wait in line for days with empty bellies to ask those fateful questions, the person to be asked was reachable, the line (queue) was there. “Pounding the pavement” to obtain walk-in, spot interviews or even to more inadvisably paper the town with one’s resume was a doable quest. Did I mention doing so was also free of charge? Plus, it wasn’t incidental either. This manner of gaining employment (in America) lasted from folks stepping off of a ship into a crowd with no money in their pockets and looking to work for room and board straight on through to “Tony working stock in the cellar of Doc’s Candy Store.” That’s an entire nation economy that (save for the massive atrocity of slave labor) was built on the backs of people consistently working and consistently getting that work just by “asking.”
The 2013 New York City, by contrast, has a barricade around every construction site, usually with at least one security guard to make sure that disturbances like your “question” are turned away at the gate. Road repair projects have actual police officers, agents of the state, pulling double duty to both guide automobile traffic around the obstruction and to most respectfully waylay your attempts at speaking with the foreman. There are both buzzers (if not doormen) and lobby security guards to keep a person out of every single New York City building when s/he does not first have an appointment. Business-focused soirees are by invitation only. Names of hiring managers and decision-makers are only published when the organization requires it and then usually without any direct contact information writ alongside. "Cattle-call" job fairs open to unlimited numbers of job-seekers ensure that even the most prepared candidate gets no more than 60 seconds to speak to a company insider who may or may not have anything to do with hiring. HR as an industry, once targeted specifically to benefits compliance and EEO responsibilities, today largely functions as a hiring clearing house unmoved by any outside contact that does not immediately relate to the express directives of a CEO’s main circle. Even the internet, a tool meant to spread information widely and freely, when it comes to job search, is a tool often used by New York companies as an additional filter or firewall between an open position the organization MIGHT be looking to fill three months down the road and the many applicants they do not wish to engage. In short, while Mr. Cosgrove's observation was constructively figurative, it is still important to note that there is no longer a Depression-like hirer out in the open to be convinced, nor is there any semblance of a physical line to wait on to “pay ones dues in hardship” as did our predecessors. The job-seeking difference between then and now is that then you could walk-in and ask everywhere until you found a job. Now, outside of first floor retail, you can still walk everywhere, but that would be until you find a place that would allow you in to merely ask a question. This is a complete reversal of odds to numbers so low it is not unlike a lottery. I am certain that those who look to the market for an explanation, or dare we hope a solution, would agree that any market cannot withstand a practice that would imply we flood just the first floor retail sector with the 7.5+ percent unemployed population in New York.

RAISON D'ÊTRE

This is precisely why Career Services exists. For lack of a direct vector to gainful employment, a methodology by which each generation looks at the next to ask, “Why don’t you just do it the way that I did it?” we instead prevail as an entire industry to help individual job-seekers navigate the newly complex, obstacle-jumping, ever-changing, standards-lacking, multi-layered, interpersonal numbers game that is each person’s unique road to career solvency. We are here to acknowledge that while there is much to be learned from how previous generations proactively acquired personal employment, platitudes like “go out and pound the pavement” or “why don’t you just walk around handing out your resume” are largely without literal merit in a city like New York. Yes, you are soon going to be asking for a job just as your grandfather did. However, skilled networking that encompasses all your digital and interpersonal assets has completely replaced what once was a matter of “walking up to a guy.” This wasn’t replaced because we created something better. It was replaced because that’s how big businesses collectively wanted the job market to take shape. By all means, if you know the guy or know of the guy or know of an open job, go ask. Be prepared, but direct. It is in this respect that we can learn from the past. Yet, if you don’t even know of the guy or where the job might be (or be created), that’s where your networking, your research, and your creativity come in and therefore where a guide through the boundlessness of those three becomes the wise choice.
With all and much due respect to my many Career Services colleagues whose precise wisdom on this subject is without compare, if a market in this downturned condition can vibrantly withstand having our entire industry remain in the economic fold; widespread specialty advisement functions that permeate the ranks of every other corporate ladder, sector, and business entity; the same economy could certainly withstand a fantasy zero percent unemployment rate that by trade-off would render Career Services professionals obsolete.

AND HOW

So, as industry professionals, even experts, we are responsible for being the living embodiment of all the latest information in the job search field. We are the one-stop litmus test for the 20,000+ job search tips that are doled out over the internet in groups of five like a music countdown. We are the go-to bank of answers that speaks to what a hiring manager wants to hear, how to target a job search, and negotiating workable compensation, all in 2013. We are the front-line on making employment documentation unique, relevant, and dynamic. We are responsible for never relegating a single job seeker to the hugely irrelevant blanket statements that represent a know-nothing person’s upturned nose at the unemployed, even when said statement remarks upon something that actually would have been good advice not so long ago.
Part of this is always statistics, numbers, groups. We are remiss when we don’t spend deep focus on how to navigate job search through an African-American male unemployment rate that is traditionally double the national rate. We have fallen down when we do not fashion useful advice on managing an ex-felon status, a special needs employment situation, a skills gap, an expatriate status, job elimination, gender-based glass ceilings, and so on, all in a capitalist structure that dictates “everyone must work” despite an American job market stuck at one available job for every four active job seekers [HBO’s Hard Times: Lost on Long Island]. If a group can be enumerated, it has been measured time and again.

JOB SEARCH STRATEGY LACUNAE FOR THE RECENT GRADUATE

To those groupings of concern we now add the recent college graduate. Like the other groups, we, as professionals, must accept that the high unemployment and underemployment numbers suddenly attached to this group not only represent an express concern not easily dismissed with opinionated tales of graduates’ inflated expectations, but also our own need as professionals to divine what it is that makes job search different for members of this group in particular. I would like to offer what I believe is clearly one part of the issue.
Delivering services to a mid-career job seeker or a job-eliminated manager or even a seeming jack-of-all-trades; we always talk in terms of strategy. Networking strategy, targeting strategy, job search strategy, the list goes on. Yes, the most specific strategy almost always entails some very common pieces of career search advice. Yes strategy, while unique to each job seeker, can be looked at overall as having components that frequently repeat person to person. For instance, everyone needs to network, everyone needs a resume, etcetera. These are vast generalizations that can trick those in our field and our customers/clients into thinking that there is a single magical formula for landing the perfect position. But strategy is just that. It is the most solitary techniques, gambits, and in-the-moment maneuvers that one will use to cross through a sea of other strategies and strategists.
The good news is that, unlike chess, there can be plenty of winners. The difficult news to swallow is that, like on a chessboard, no strategy exists in a vacuum. Chess players are confined by the edges of the board, the rules of the game, the fixed numbers of pieces, and countless familiarities with what defenses fail against what offenses. The viability of one’s chess strategy is further tested, interrupted, slowed, and/or left wanting with an opponent’s every move. Reevaluating and adjusting strategy in real-time is a requisite part of reaping expected returns. Where to start, how to start, and how to continue are living, breathing mechanisms that while complex, could not exist if both players approached the board with their own set of rules, or, to the point, no rules at all, no confines, no foundation on which to build. There would be no game and nothing would get done.
Please consider that a mid-career job seeker coming to you as a Career Services professional for first time help, does so, even unwittingly, with some honest-to-goodness personal confines in tow. That is to say that, numbers crunched, household amenities cut, coupons clipped, whatever the case, the basis for the strategy is somewhat laid out before us. If s/he takes a position at less than a certain compensation, that family will be homeless within two years. S/he may not be able to work nights and weekends without paying out in child care more than what would be earned working those nights and weekends. Single income families tend to have continuing benefits issues more than dual income families. Age related medical issues have already begun to reveal themselves. S/he tends to have a spouse and family already when such is in the cards. At least a general understanding of one’s unsecured debt, credit rating, and investment options is something that, if not known, can be found out. Savings accounts and severance packages can often be tapped to fuel an employment gap. With all these issues in play, you are certainly never going to suggest a strategy that mimics those aforementioned upturned noses and advises her/him to “just get a job at McDonald’s for now while we figure out something better.” This is a person who will have much of a unique strategy firmly founded in static, financial need as defined and afforded by the earlier portion of a career. Career Services professionals are not making something from nothing. They make strategy from foundation.
Recent graduates have far less foundation for a strategy. In addition to their strong median tendency toward lesser comparative, practical experience in their respective fields, many of their forthcoming life decisions have yet to reveal themselves as positive or negative. They share perceivable similarities with Schrödinger's cat. They’ll begin with little or no savings as did the Great Depressioner, but also start out their careers in an immediate and sizable debt that Great-Grandad could never have imagined. That’s a debt that will follow them into marriage and sometimes children. They’ll also begin with nearly the least amount of sheer access, direct or indirect, to any job openings as compared to the already employed, the seasoned job-seeker, or even the middlingly-connected young professional. While the immediate circle of digital acquaintances that surrounds a 2013 graduate is a far larger web of network connections than some 40-year-old counterpart; that counterpart’s connections are mostly work colleagues and close friends. The bulk of the graduate’s network is likely other unemployed graduates looking for job leads.
The access represented by a hiring manager out in the open? That’s a relic of old New York. It is all too simple to sum up, say, a graduate’s lack of mortgage, marriage, children, and tax burden to a more advantageous job search stance as if s/he should be wildly open to any job that comes along simply because s/he can relocate more easily or because s/he has a whole life of potential career changes ahead if step one doesn’t work out. These things they lack, the savings, the paid debt, the access, the experience, the life choices, the hallmarks of foundation for every “other” job search strategy; this vast vacuum of would-be useable indicators does not, cannot, and should not represent in a Career Service professional’s mind some excuse to presume their strategy is any simpler. In fact, it will be far more complex.

THE META OF CAREER SERVICES

The deeper truth here is that Career Services professionals have to look inward and completely reshape what they offer when it comes to job-seeking graduates as a group. How can we possibly justify cobbling together generalizations and stratagems honed on more precise foundations as if itemizing what worked elsewhere somehow constitutes a strategy here? How can we rest our laurels on being the first to inform a student about job search mainstays as if the fact that sounding novel to them is in some way providing a useful service? The problem is not even that graduates’ foundations differ so greatly, person to person or group to group, as would be the case when comparing, say, the 50-year old, Asian-American single mother of four working two jobs to maintain mortgage payments with the 30-year-old newly minted MD who has just been downsized from Investment Banking after relocating himself and his fiancée across country. The problem is that we are somewhat whole-hog, automatically supplanting the genuine absence of a foundation with familiar foundations that actually do exist elsewhere. We’ve not been wary of properly viewing these “cases” as a negative space, a complete absence of the indicators usually used to launch a realistic career strategy. We are taking everything that HAS worked, even for graduates of the past, and are offering it to today's graduates explaining why it SHOULD work. Meanwhile, the numbers of unemployed graduates grow as we point fingers around trying to find a scapegoat in everything from government to the job seeker’s own attitude.
I think it is fair to conclude that as far apart as the 2013 job-eliminee is, strategy-wise, from the fellow who got on an assembly line by being the first to show up in 1939, so too are 2013’s recent graduates miles apart, strategy-wise, from all other job seeking groups.
Let’s innovate. Professional improvisers, the types you see on “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?” often assert that they are making entertainment from nothing, conjuring small, applaud-worthy hits from thin air. Those within the theatrical community who disagree with this assessment sometimes counter using the observation that each improvisation exercise has a structure (like a chess board) and that most of the exercises incorporate previously unknown input from the audience or the environment (like strategic indicators). This debate rolls on, the latter group calling foul on the “nothing” idea while the former group, truly believing in the “something from nothing” concept, idealistically pushes ever forward to use fewer and fewer inputs/structures/indicators whilst figuring in on how to yield the same, entertaining results. Those “improv’ers” need not be 100% correct for our industry to learn from them. The mere fact that they function quite well under the fervent belief that their work literally hails from a vacuum is a noteworthy glimpse at just how alternative our approaches need be to service the recent graduate.
So, which familiar elements of cutting-edge Career Services have the most in common with creating something from nothing? Right off the bat, teaching job seekers to best convince an employer to create a new position for them comes to mind. Also, creating company-specific, research-based, professional PitchBooks with a supporting live presentation to demonstrate where businesses might be leaving money on the table further fits within this premise. Acquiring the venture capital to launch one’s own business, again, reads similarly to a “something from nothing” effort. Plus, rare Career Services professionals who can engage graduates in, for instance, a studied Jungian approach, pitting matters of archetype and imagery against the more mundane rigors of job search, certainly employ a methodology deriving its strongest strategic indicators from the intangible mind alone [“The Career as a Path to the Soul”]
At first glance, this set of insights seems counterintuitive. Why would we jump directly to advising on the supremely difficult paths to have a job created for a job-seeker who is working on the first-ever draft of a resume and who has never been to a single interview in her/his field? It seems like putting the cart before the horse. Why would we study the psychological disciplines of Carl Jung, Yoram Kaufmann, David Rottman, and others when only so very rarely has there been such a noted requirement in the Career Services field before we, ourselves, could be hired? Why drift from the practices that we know are best practices for the sake of largely alternative strategies? Well, because zero percent unemployment is a fantasy, while Career Services going the way of the dodo is something that can realistically happen through the mere appearance of it failing. Any university trying to rebrand its Career Services Department through a paradigm shift can tell you, for the recent graduates group, as a group, we are failing.

WHAT TO CONCLUDE

This behemoth of a shift in approach is the higher degree of complexity I’d prefaced earlier, the one that need replace the “easier search stance” misnomer that is normally attached to a “student” situation. So, we look into ourselves, not just to find the very demanding Career Services answers above to replace or augment our typical approaches, but also to ask of ourselves, “Does this sound farfetched because we cannot make it work, or does it sound farfetched because it would require of us so much more work?

Long ago, I was part of a non-denominational, Christian bible study, one of many geared for college-aged agnostics. It was one of the few faith-based programs I’d explored throughout my mid-twenties that expressly elected to begin the course from a more balanced “doubter’s” position, first attempting to debate and convince on foundation rather than take any group buy-in for granted. That was unique. Many such programs, as I’d encountered them, previously relied somewhat upon the, “You wouldn’t be here if some part of you didn’t already believe,” approach.

I’d wondered if I’d had something to do with the group’s leaders taking that dialectical stance, having expressed in my earlier relationships with them that as a then practicing and well researched agnostic, I found a possible god-centered existence to be “tempting.” As one might expect, this was a group that had always linguistically identified “temptation” with Satan, hell, serpents, and flesh. It would be no surprise to learn that my outsider’s take on just the word “temptation” might have forced an alternative, bare-bones approach to everything they’d hoped to teach, flipping-the-script, so to speak. “Heaven knows,” I would have thrown in more monkey wrenches if I could have.

While not necessary to share in a post of this fashion whether I found their generalized Christian assertions convincing or not, I did find their evidences as to a relatively unbroken through-line from bible translation to bible translation somewhat useful. That’s to say that many a fledgling practitioner of fellowship in my generation is called upon to counter more secular platitudes than forensic evidences.

“How can God be all powerful AND all good?”

“Can God make a rock that is too big for even him to lift?”

“How did Noah get two (and six) of every species on the ark?”

Among these was a standard social blossom of witticisms that roughly amalgamate to, “Even if the original books of the New Testament did have something correct or factual in their content, wouldn’t their meaning have been lost in translation from language to language to language?”

Now, even then, I knew of the ever-forward push to seek out earlier ancient texts in contemporary times and translate directly to common American English from sources chronologically closer to +/- 34 A.D. Yet, I, like many of my day, questioned the motives of the would-be translators and therefore the authenticity of their singular translations. I would also question results arrived at in this way if they failed to include other ancient writings similarly dated. A translation without context tends to work only for a bad fiction or two, if at all. Interestingly, that modern-day push for superlative source materials did not wind up in the bible study group’s pronouncements at all. Nor did they rebut with the then standard “God breathed his breathe into the hands of those who translated.”

Emergence of Method

Rather, over the course of three nights, much of the argument built on “their side” dealt with the manner in which texts of all kinds got copied, pre-printing press. By-hand reproductions and retranslations happening on disparate mountain tops in variant nation states, conducted by individuals with divergent styles and levels of language education, most of whom had never met, illuminated by monks and the like for the illiterate masses, recurring for nearly thousands of years, creates for our modern scholars a microcosmic proving-grounds of authenticity.

As that group would postulate, continually “unearthing” our lexicon of biblical copies provides a broad range of comparisons. When individuals conducted their own translations in locations far apart from each other and autonomously delivered the same or the infinitesimally near same result, there is something to be said for the legitimacy of that matchable final content. When, say, one-hundred fifty discovered copies from such a time period separated by great land masses match almost exactly and two do not, it is reasonable to assume that the two variants are in some way flawed, though not unimportant. The one-fifty, by contrast, are likely closest to the intended meaning of the untranslated texts from which they hail, those in turn revealing a similar numeric relationship to the even earlier texts that preceded them. Taken word by word, phrase by phrase, or story by story, it would be impossible for a translator to flourish, adjust, or deceive in a manner that almost perfectly matches another’s attempt at doing the same when physically worlds apart.

So, while not ultimately comprehensive and bypassing additional branches of translation that contributed less to our modern English pieces, the study group followed well exampled chains of such evidence that meandered through ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, German, and eventually English. I did have to go to a few libraries to fill in some of the gaps for myself and shore up a few conclusions to which the group had jumped. Still, this was my first exposure to the methodology and it was relatively tight. Each new discovery of such a text expanded the range of comparisons and further honed what could be understood from more original texts. It was a scholar’s approach.

Sure, a hindsight process like this cannot not rule out a global conspiracy to alter scripture post-printing press nor necessarily speak to whether anything in a seminal text was inherently factual. The process also admittedly included some difficulty in discerning multiples of copies that were all derived from a single book written in the same language, artificially inflating the numbers from which we might properly judge. There are, though, ways to rule out purely transcribed replicas.

This practice did do a surprisingly great job, however, in exhibiting the linkages from bible to bible reaching ever further back in written archives, successfully breaching prominent language barriers. When reaching back far enough into history, it made similar sense to trace out those patterns as the “bible” broke out into individual books. Unlike other predications that eventually require study group participants to indulge in the great mystery, this one was a reasonable illustration in countering a common platitude. Where other affirmations call for blind acceptance, this was something that if I had the inclination to either prove or disprove, they’d provided a logical place to start, something that I could actually go and see. It turns out that “going and seeing” is a great many people’s life’s work.

A Modern Equivalent

In a sense, the process is none too dissimilar from the manner in which Google uses its dedicated engines to translate digital chat across the globe. Theirs is not a simple, static program that equivocates, say, one French word to one Japanese word. It’s better. Sourcing reference material from the vast, existing deep net information cloud, a cloud that includes litany after litany of texts translated by multiple professionals and delivered online, the engine can first search for how many times a particular phrase has been translated by humans in a particular way, draw a best solution from that analyzed statistic, and rapidly morph matching chat box input into a recipient’s mother tongue without users even knowing. Currently the technology is said to be useful only for chatting and texting lengths. Still, that’s a far cry from just a few years ago when stand-alone programs would crank output that would read “The pen from my aunt is on the table of my uncle, says me.”

The useful similarities between the ever-broadening comparisons of ancient, hand-translated texts and the ever-expanding cloud from which Google chat engines discern a human-based “likeliest” intent leads me to wonder. Can this method be rationally applied to our distant future? How will the digitized, databased, freely copied, easily altered and paraphrased information made available to our age be understood and vetted for authenticity in millennia to come? With temes (technological memes) and all their typos, flaws, mistakes, and errors copying themselves at incalculable rates, frequently without human intention or intervention, how will future historians sift for the accurate or originating sources from which intent is best derived? Disinformation is presently distributed with ease while opinions and faulty interpretations are now “published” in greater volume than exhaustively fact-checked material. The numbers strategy used on pre-printing press texts will likely not apply to purely digital material. It’s a problem.

Forecasting the Mentality

Think about it. We’ve arguably six go-to versions of most plays by Shakespeare, all passed down in print (first folio, second folio, first quarto, second quarto, third quarto, and fourth quarto), and from the minor differences in those hard copies , after only 400 years, we still cannot always discern Shakespeare’s unquestionable intent betwixt the divergent lines. Now imagine similar differences for every publication that are:

multiplied by the trillions

all accessible in ways that are effortless to alter and reproduce by the entire community

daisy-chained across generations

stored in manners that take up so little space as to make them practically intangible

encouraging a ramification-free flood of flawed saves

proliferating over not hundreds, but thousands of years

on media designed to last, without degradation, lifetimes longer than bound books

Is it too low-brow for me to claim that the whole thing’s just a mess?

If this is your first time encountering such a concern, let me assure you that I am not nearly the only person to scratch the surface here. Veritable hoards of archivists, historians, records keepers, ‘ographers and ‘ologists of all kinds have thought long and hard, and to great results, about the more contemporary needs in cataloging post-industrial print (at the least). My aforementioned illustration is amateurish at best. The sheer proliferation of modern written material alone requires a large, driven sector of the workforce dedicated to nothing but archiving. I imagine that at least some people come to these tasks as their “calling,” as might, coincidentally, a priest, a monk, a teacher, or a non-profit worker delivering betterments to masses.

So, before we presume as to what might seem my chief complaint, “We can’t properly keep track of anything anymore,” please allow me to share at least a few of my experiences with the people who are fighting that good fight.

The Summer Experience

In 2002, I’d had the wonderful fortune to join a program called The Summer Experience that allowed me to stay at a Benedictine Monastery in upstate New York. While Benedictine monastics are widely known for their open guest policies, The Summer Experience was different, permitting a select few candidates to live as the monks do, exploring that comparatively rarified facet of faith-based lifestyles. We took meals with monks, dressed as they did, lived in rooms still referred to as cells, worked the fields to eat, sheered sheep, pruned orchards, were granted full access to areas of the monastery off limits to the public, and broke up every day (seven days a week) with seven traditional chapel attendances (canonical hours), one of which was always a full Roman Catholic mass. This was a more modern practice as in times past, eight or nine canonical hours were observed.

Coming from New York City, rural Benedictine living was a culture shock to say the least, but one that rapidly grew on a suddenly unplugged, topographically isolated seeker of wisdom like me. I don’t think that even now I could count the number of positive, brand new impressions that summer 2002 had made on me, but certainly chief among them was a lifestyle concept in “The Word.” These men fully believed that the purest experience of faith came from “lectio divina” [lex-ee-oh di-veen-ah] or “divine reading.” Reading, hearing, and living repeated inspirations as expressed in sermons, prayers, Gregorian chants, gospel readings, bible study, and other wordplay truly pulled life’s center from the self, to something other, whether that something was or was not deity. It was made clear that life lived orbiting any core beyond the ego was a transcendent experience to be learned from.

So while much of the day was spent in quiet contemplation with almost literal hopes of hearing God speak, it could not escape anyone’s notice that this lectio was not at all limited to scripture. The importance ascribed lectio, while Christ-leaning in all regards as would be expected of that group, was an importance nonetheless attributed to all reading, all words, all knowledge. The monastery subscribed to more classic magazines than a doctor’s office in Manhattan, all fully studied by the time I might ever touch any one. Time, Omni, Wired, National Geographic, they all made the collection. Newspapers from around the world in nine or more languages arrived every morning, most read well before sun-up by nearly every monk in attendance. The Prior was not only both a monk and a fully ordained priest, but a licensed medical doctor, three vocations that each require a lifetime of study and dedication. Lunch and dinner were eaten in silence, but for the fact that someone would always perform a “reading at table,” reading to the group for the entire duration of the leisurely meal on a small mic or in an echoing chamber from one of the countless books on site. Our rooms, our cells, were right in the middle of an expansive library, a time-honored architecture that situated every waking moment to the midst of knowledge. The library itself was no slouch, boasting fiction, biographies, reference materials, histories, science, periodicals, in many ways quite superior to the local public library I’d known when growing up. There were Mark Twain first editions that needed to be handled with cotton gloves not a stone’s throw from an encyclopedia of human sexuality.

And therein nestles the rub. See, technically, Benedictine monastics take a vow of poverty, among others. They are not permitted to OWN anything. The very clothes on their backs do not belong to them and while I expect it doesn’t happen much, if the Abbot or Prior were to ask them to give up the attire, they would. So, those books in the library, all those wonderful books, did not come from monks dropping spare change at a rummage sale. Abbots did not go out to the mall and snap up product from the overpriced New Age section at B. Dalton Bookseller. A frank preponderance of those books, books arriving in numbers too many for even the monk in charge to finish cataloging on the day, were donations. Estates, individuals, local libraries falling on hard times, they all thought to do what I had never, until then, known possible. They sent the books as donations into a system without ownership, a place where the library itself (or at least the collection) could exist in perpetuity because there was no present element of financial tie. When a monk passes, there’s nothing to hand down. The books stay. Forgotten books, groundbreaking or not, that might have once sat on a greasy apartment shelf alongside dusty cookbooks growing ever closer to the recycle bin, were instead sent to a place that would instantaneously transform them from rotting trash to cared-for, living records of the past.

This does not happen by accident. It is not as if there’s some default fine print in a last will and testament that states if you fail to bequeath your literature, the church gets it. People left entire collections of books, religious and secular, scientific and mathematical, significant and otherwise to this monastery simply because they believed these books belonged there, that there was some good to be done in the act. That’s a strong statement. See, the library is not open to the public. Giving to it is barely a form of charity. Only the monks and those with access to the inner cells will ever even see the library. If a dying person wanted to share her/his collection with the world, better the texts be given to the local public library or to a school or an upstart book sale. Rather, it was both obvious and heartening to discern that individuals and organizations sent books here to ever broaden and deeper-establish the record of us. They send writing to a place that values knowledge, without being able to own it, so that those writings might persist far beyond our days and contribute to a well-informed future. As impressive as the monks were in this centuries-practiced undertaking, I also walked away with a very logical joy in knowing that it was regular people, everyday working class and middle class contemporaries who made that all happen. The notion of needing intellectually appraisable records, pathways to originals, diverse knowledge, wasn’t a concern to only the small cross-section of the most educated among us. Like a time capsule, those voluminous donations fed the human compunction to record the fact that we were here, that we were significant, that we considered the future, and that we could be understood, as a group, to have had culture that need not perish from memory.

ProQuest

In 2007 I, personally, had the great fortune to experience a lengthily extended private tour of ProQuest’s operation in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While library systems and networks of museums perform their massive parts of the cataloging and archiving processes, free market, for-profit “information resources and technologies” outfits like ProQuest add to that massive undertaking, bidding on the rights to commit different publishing sectors to posterity. The facility was gargantuan, just one of several locations emphasizing not only worldwide workload, but the dire need for redundancy. Behind the scenes, the root operation of the widespread services they offer was a colossal and streamlined methodology for getting every page committed to microfiche and microfilm. College dissertations, magazines, books, reference materials; if they’d won the bid, recording each flake in the avalanche was their responsibility. It was unfailingly impressive. Recognizing that this was a competitive market and that therefore ProQuest’s business rivals were also out and about doing the same, was even more impressive.

Defining the Problem

At first glance, my passing reference to microfiche and microfilm might seem like an investment in outmoded media. Surely, with the internet 4Ging its way into my very pocket on a mountaintop, I must acknowledge having last touched a microfiche during the Carter administration for a grade school report on the 1969 moon landing. So, while obligated to point out that ProQuest and libraries, national archives and museum systems, are all doing wonders with converting centuries of content into being digitally accessible, I do have to simultaneously draw attention to the very notion of microfilm and microfiche being passé as the crux of my original problem.

My chief complaint is NOT that “We can’t properly keep track of anything anymore.” It’s that the cavalier attitude with which we consume and accept our digital information so easily allows us to downgrade or forget about the importance of maintaining concrete archives in the first place. The “don’t believe everything you read” idiom, derived from a mostly paper-based onslaught of mass media, in the digital age, has become an axiom. We disbelieve so much of it, that we believe none of it, on purpose. That wasn’t the point of the phrase.

Think about this contention. “Of course, I know that there are likely to be errors and inconsistencies in this Hawthorne piece that somebody typed in by hand and posted to his blog! Who cares? It’s accurate enough for my needs. Besides, I’d have to pay Barnes & Noble to get my own copy. How do you know theirs is any better?” I submit to you that the most disturbing part of this quote is not the “who cares” or the “accurate enough,” it may well be the “of course.” It’s the rather blind, pan-societal acceptance of the nature of digital text as a new animal, as a convenient beast, that’s okay with us. The novelty of it, used well or poorly, far outweighs people’s motivation to pursue someone else’s precision, someone else’s published fact, someone else’s originating intent. Was this not the lesson in George Orwell’s Animal Farm? Oh wait, maybe somebody changed the lesson while I wasn’t looking.

The Generational Voice of the Problem

Allow me to illustrate how this takes place in the mind.

Sharing my impressions of the ProQuest operation soon after the tour, my words fell on the ears of a great listener, a long-time compatriot of mine and fellow wisdom seeker. The topic was outside of his realm of experience and he allowed me to drone on about every detail I could remember commandeering more than an hour’s worth of the conversation. At a convenient break in my monologue, he choose to take a step back from the matter and pose a question I would have otherwise thought was commonly understood. He asked, “But why would anybody go through all of that when everything is digital now?” He added, “Why store reel after reel of microfilm in such a huge, expensive place when it can take up nearly zero space on a giant hard drive or server?” Before the objection ended, he’d put me in mind of another long-time friend who actually works for the publishing paragon Harper Collins. She, despite her advanced intelligence and complete immersion in the publishing industry, as well as her own high-level work in preparing e-books for readers like the Amazon Kindle, worried if these digital technologies would mean “the end of books as we knew them.” Even dead center in the maelstrom of best evidences, the future need for non-digital media somewhat eluded her, as it did him.

Both of my friends had been made to perceive, made to believe, that digital texts are better, the wave of the future. They silently postulate that in the face of “better” things, older things or presumably “lesser” things cease to function. In their momentary observations and worries they could not at all derive a single reason why microfilm or books would ever again serve to fulfill a need. Need, to them, was hierarchical, the next always trumping the previous. For instance, we need a new TV when the old one doesn’t work anymore.

In the case of my first friend, I felt challenged in having to explain to such a smart person that, unlike digitally recorded data, microfilm could not be altered. It is a picture of the text, not the text itself. Hand me a piece of paper with the words “I love you” penciled on it, and I can easily and somewhat convincingly erase the “love,” replacing it with “hate.” Take a photograph of that same paper, then just hand me the photograph. I would be infinitely harder-pressed to alter what it said. Then, even if that photo’s authenticity came into question 1000 years later, we could compare the photograph to the original, and voilà, a truly forensic examination ensues yielding fact after fact about the content, the author, the authenticity, the chain of evidence, and possibly about plagiarists, revisionists, would-be deceivers, copyrights, and history. The relationship of the paper to the photo in the example is the same relation of the digital text to the printed or “microfiched” text in an archive.

As a generation, we’ve failed to accurately ascribe the importance of the digital. That’s to say that digital media is, in fact, better, but only better as a DELIVERY SYSTEM. Digital text, audio, video, signaling; it’s the greatest delivery device for information to which mankind has ever clung. The role of digital delivery is not unlike the printing press, getting more copies of more works to more people in less time, with less effort. It’s like having a printing press for everyone. There is immense value in that.

Yet a delivery system is a service, not a good. We’ve greatly attributed to the digital an importance extended well beyond its role as a delivery device, as if it, in itself, was an artifact or tangible resource. We see this “miracle” of our technology and falsely expect that archeologists will one day dig up the remnants of a thriving 2011 and dramatically hold up to the sky a flash-drive digitally inscribed with Mapquest directions to Applebee’s as if it was the Rosetta Stone. In our present state of mind, we look at an e-book and say, “That’s the book. That’s what books are now. That’s likely what books will look like for a long time to come.” Wrong. That’s an illusion. The purpose of writing is communication, a purpose served by digitization, but the purpose of formal publishing is to establish a record of that communication as intended, as originated. Books have always served more than one need. They spread ideas, facts, opinions, ads, and entertainments, of course, but they also were records of the ideas, facts, opinions, ads, and entertainments as those human components existed in their purest form. They persisted beyond death, even the death of entire civilizations. We haven’t sacrificed purity for delivery, exactly, we’ve simply divided them up in order to try to achieve the best of both worlds. We rely on unalterable archives for the purity, the record, and we rely on digital media for the speedy communication, pure or not. Both are needed.Are You Part of the Problem?

Re-explained, my chief complaint is that, as a group, we are slowly forgetting that both are needed. We embrace one significantly more than the other. Doing so is fine, individual to individual, but if a strong and mouthy preponderance of individuals begin to, even for a single generation, languish under the mass delusion that the service is more important than the good, in the case of texts, how long will it be before we stop paying people to archive? How long will it be before we view that library system’s effort as unnecessary and withdraw funding? What happens when nobody sees archiving as a calling? What happens to the original goods when the old service is no longer deemed a worthwhile undertaking? As Richard Dreyfus appearing on Real Time with Bill Maherso imperatively reminded us on the subject of teaching civics in schools, “...unless we teach what that means, it will go away in your kid's lifetime, and we will be a fable.” It only takes one generation to forget. The same applies to archiving. It only takes one generation to devalue its purpose before all after generations are contented without it.

Taken Out of Context

I’ve come to sincerely revere the people of the past who so diligently made certain that our understanding of older human ways would persist into every possible future, especially mine. They drew on cave walls. They fashioned alphabets. They carved into stone. They copied by hand, in the most permanent inks they had, over entire lifetimes. They established libraries, translated vigorously, painted on canvas, invented the printing press, bound books, invented film, struck thick metal commemorative plaques, and constructed vacuum-sealed time capsules. The sheer historical diversity of goods that still exist, texts especially, not only provides us the annals of time long gone, but their vastness also gives us the contexts needed to understand them more and more. The digital age, while making strides of its own to counter this disparity, has a participatory context of everyone, everywhere, at all times. That’s the same as not having a context at all.

So, the older system of archiving using ink, books, climate controlled containment, microfiche, microfilm, etcetera is still perfectly valid because it is ever-expansively needed. This is a way of saying that books (and pictures of them…you can’t have the picture of the original without once having the published original in hand) serve not an outdated need, but a persistent need. They are the forensic proofs of when digital text has undergone accidental or purposeful alteration. The more we print, even the drivel, the more we have to commit to posterity in creating not only our records, but our context. We’d never crumple up the original U.S. Constitution thinking that the millions of digital copies, even the ones that are accurate, would suffice. Why? Because then there would never exist any way to be CERTAIN of its original content, intent. Trust is one thing. I trust the National Archives to properly post transcripts of the U.S. Constitution online. Proof is a completely different process and matter. For proof I have to visit the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom and see it myself. I have to go on a day when its exact replica is not on exhibit because the original Constitution is having its display case appraised for maximum protection against the elements. Again, seeing is not proof of the intent of the writers, but in language, what’s written is as close as we can possibly get, especially soon or long after an author’s death.

The problem as I perceive it, the mess created by the influx of highly popular and useful digitization, is one whose solution remains metacognitive. We are likely never going to create a digital medium as untamperable as hard copies. The digital, by design, is malleable and its existence as a superior delivery system lends that malleability a full community-driven momentum. From where I sit, the likely best we can do, as a generation, is to remember the importance of tangible archives. Retask the mind on the glories of digitization. We have to look inward and examine exactly why we simply think that digital stuffs are goods, goods that are “better” than other goods like books or pictures of books. We have to teach our conclusions to the next generation and them to the folks that come after. We have to persist in our understanding of the importance of recording, even if that understanding is regained anew as previous generations might forget to exemplify it.

Should it be the destiny of archives to become extinct, we don’t want to be the digital generation who started them down that spiral. Yes, the work sectors tasked with archiving, library sciences, restoration, historical acquisitions, and scholarly interpretation are thriving well in our America today. That does not make me any less disheartened when I hear a frequent “So what?” on the subject, or a “Why?” This respect for the manner in which we preserve documentation cannot be relegated to only those whose job it is to get that done. The case outlining archival importance cannot be the expected knowledge of only the most educated among us. These would be like trusting the task to a cult or secret society. Those folks only have those jobs because we perceive those jobs as necessary. If the mass perception fails, as it’s like to do in the shadow of digitization, the jobs will eventually go away. Just perceiving text preservation correctly becomes everybody’s job. Hitting save does not SAVE.

We might be battling a disappearing thought process. It seems to me that even the minimum wage-earning 17 year-old in 1955, smoking a cigarette, having a beer, and listening to rock ‘n’ roll while tinkering on a car engine, rebellion and all, had more mental expectation that our past was being properly recorded than some of the full-grown, better educated, contemporary adults of Gen X and Gen Y. That 1955 teenager was instilled with stories from his parents, card-carrying members of the self-proclaimed Greatest Generation, stories that made him want to make as much of an impact on the world in his own time and way as they had, stories that created dreams, stories that lasted well beyond the acts that gave rise to them and well beyond the lifespans of those who’d lived them…important stories punctuated with purple hearts and folded flags kept in boxes in attics. He might have felt like the “little guy” at the time, but at least he knew that there were “bigger” folks than him out there making sure that his family’s sacrifices would never be forgotten. He may not have ever heard of “archiving,” but to him it was important.

Today, thirty/forty-somethings whose lives stretch back to when the only digital tool in the home was an alarm clock, me and my peers, we tweet, game, comment, like, unlike, share, text, email, chat, thread, blog, ping, link, and search with instantaneous ease. Whether that ease was created by our human drives or our drives an outgrowth of that ease, the surge seems an almost desperate attempt to record our own fractured, non-linear stories. It seems we want to always communicate, to participate in the growing dialogues and establish our presence in what there is to be said. And, in so doing, we get the chance that something, just something, no matter how small, something of us might live on beyond our own end. That’s good. Still, like the “lost in translation” platitude offered earlier about the Christian bible, we don’t trust anybody else to do it for us. We perform these actions ourselves. We don’t presume that we have something important enough to convey that somebody else might consider committing it to posterity, and if we do, we don’t trust them to accurately cache our personal intent. So, not as readily offered the opportunity to formally publish and therefore formally contribute to the archives, we opt for the great delivery device. We skip the formalities and put it all out there. What once might have been the notes, outlines, early drafts, errors, changes, edits, corrections, thoughts, and reminders that would never make it to the final manuscript of a publication are all included in our digital endeavors, chronologically mashed-up with each micro-step taken by everyone else who’s doing the same. That’s a reversal!

In yesteryear, a paper published by, say, Einstein was FIRST viewed as groundbreaking enough to gain worldwide attention, and because of that piece’s impact we are LATER thrilled to discover some of his original notes, likewise storing them in The Library of Congress. It was the recognition of the completed, comprehensive work that makes the original notes at all relevant or interesting. The digital has enabled us to switch our attitude on that sequencing. Now we, as readers and “writers,” believe our notes and originating thoughts interesting in and of themselves. That’s what we “write.” We look for no final work, no conclusions, no thru-line, and we are okay with that. Whatever relevance might be present in any such quick posts, we are comfortable in mentally bypassing it, which lends cognitive license to all the times we, ourselves, wish to purposely post without relevance for fun. The cloud we create is a vaster one, but with a diminished pith. We know that, so we take it with a grain of salt. We treat the digitally networked world as a bit of a guilty pleasure, absent-mindedly consigning the digitally published, digitally marketed world to a similar diminished importance. It becomes a sort of “They have it on iTunes, why would they buy a CD?” understanding of preservation. I bet that “little guy” in 1955 readily knows why. Moreover, Gen-Y knows what 1955 wanted them to know only because Johnny-common understood what they often do not. Archives are valuable exactitudes that exist only as long as we continue to think of them as a need.

Conclusion

Celebrate the digital, but espouse it only as what is, a box. It’s the most attractive and useful box humans have ever created, but one that perpetually ensures the possibility that the contents of your box could be invisibly changed by any of the fourteen billion hands it went through before arriving on your doorstep. The only way to truly know if Grandma meant to send you a dirty limerick, or if she instead intended to send a check for your first semester of college, is to visit her every so often and have her show you the gift before it gets wrapped.

A nihilist, a dodecahedron, and a cruciverbalist walk into a bar in heaven called KNOW THYSELF. The nihilist says, "I believe I'll have a beer," and immediately disappears. Seeing this, the frightened dodecahedron says, "I would, but I am a little out of shape," and also vanishes into thin air. The cruciverbalist smiles coyly at the bartender and says, "Two down."

Most of my preferred forms of entertainment involve escapism. When given the downtime and opportunity I am no stranger to, say, sitting in a movie theatre and fully suspending my disbelief, rolling up a decent Dungeons & Dragons druid at table complete with awkwardly named animal companion, or finding that spot under a tree in the sunlight that allows me to not only revisit the carefree days of my youth, but also sink my teeth into any well-crafted thrill betwixt O. Henry and Dan Brown.

Yet, I find myself more and more frequently, more and more deeply, desiring richer forms of decompression. There was a time when traveling was the stress reliever I’d consistently swear by. Camping, while escapist in the sense of disconnecting from the modern world, was also proactive in engaging the natural one. I feel almost silly when having to write that “I do remember going to parties.”It happens. It’s life. We mature and as we do we mature into different sets of priorities and responsibilities. We do so as our oldest friends might move away, as our work colleagues might never join us outside of the office, and as our original support systems give way to new ones that can tend toward focusing on that set of priorities rather than you, the “needy” individual who’d arranged them.

And when this happens, it is no wonder why downtime might get more readily fractured and spent in microcosm. It is no surprise that chosen forms of entertainment for a contemporary adult are steered, perhaps for the first time in life, toward activities that involve lesser and lesser planning, lesser and lesser engagement with people, lesser cost, lesser durations, and frequently lesser return on your attempt to tame the stressors. That tropical island is far away and you can only afford the group rate, but television is right there. Organized volunteering can feel like work, but there’s an Entenmann’s cake on the counter within arm’s reach. What beauty could possibly be experienced at that poetry reading when you’ve got the ultimate beauty of your significant other right there, in-house? Let’s get real. What decent and career-driven parent has time for an underwater spelunking hobby?

So we read for half hour clips. We flip on the video game and keep a steady finger poised on the pause button, prepping for the twenty interruptions that will likely befall our only biweekly block of “alone time.” We pretend that sleep is one hundred percent recuperative and that a Saturday stroll around the block is getting us somewhere.

These truisms I bring up for discussion are nothing new. Our entire Generation X and those coming up behind us have been aware of the dangers of poor stress relief decisions for a lifetime. Studies continue to show that the results of doing nothing about stress are particularly severe, a severity that increases with the number of and complexity of stressors in our environments. So, in a sense, these words I write to re-familiarize readers with a problem that has not gone away, could in some manner be considered a case against escapism and for what I’ll call “engagism.” Written as such and supported by study, it would seem not only important to create the downtime in heftier spans, but to use that time in a single, uninterrupted and engaged practice that relieves pressures. It’s not that you have the vacation; it is what you do with it. The physical toll of stress takes a lot more to undo than most realize.

Still, I am somewhat more compelled to bring up a mental toll that my personal stress level has helped into being. Like the cause and effect written about above, we are also familiar with the common metal tolls of poorly exercised decompression mechanisms. Inability to concentrate, memory difficulties, lack of attention span, more frequented mistakes, verbal exchanges that take place in anger, sleep difficulties, disengaged behavior, some forms of depression, they are all mental products related to elevated stress. Everybody is further familiar with the proverbial extremes of this state. We speak of people who “crack” or “lose it” indicating our belief in a personal threshold for mental stress that, when surpassed, has the power to change a person forever after.

I, like many, have been happy enough to accept both these common notions and these extreme notions of mental stress without further investigation. However, whereas I once might have thought those lists to be quite complete, when looking in on myself, I see what I believe is a disregarded and very dangerous mental reaction to stress.

Having opted so often for escapism over engagism in my grown-up entertainment selections, that escapism has become a very, very commonplace response to my environment. It is so well practiced as my go-to idea on “fun” that I no longer think about it, re-examine it, question it, or challenge it. I’ve nullified choice. I’ve become my own Pavlov’s dog. Layer that well-burned neural pathway onto both the fact that the escapism doesn’t always yield fun and the fact that it is practiced in microcosm with interruptions and split focus and you start to see that the go-to idea no longer even serves the purpose of escaping. Escapism itself becomes less of device for de-stressing and more of a cyclical form of thought that goes by without notice. Not really used for fun aymore, it’s now a familiar thought pattern that gets misapplied to almost anything else I might be too stressed to examine properly. In my case, as might be the case with many men, I’ve attached that thought process to my unfounded excuses.

What do I mean? I’ve realized very recently that, while I’ve always known I am far from perfect, I am also in no way living up to the current best that I can be. In my youth, this was an imperative. Always being the best I could be and however that stacked up against life was my prime directive. I understood it as my raison d’être through the touchier, feelier parenting techniques of my elders who dictated, “Win or lose, so long as you’ve done your best, that’s all that matters.” Being the best I could be was a self-evident truth that encompassed not only the clear hope of always expanding that possibility, creating new personal bests, but in a large way my core identity. It was a concept that simultaneously spoke to me as an individual (as my best would differ from that of others) and as a shared experience (in that so many would also try to be the best they could be).

Somehow, at sometime, I’ve relaxed that concept. I’ve become lazy about it. And it’s my unexamined, escapist, thought process that has allowed me to perpetuate under the delusion that this is okay. See, whereas some husbands might take their escapism to a practiced extreme, devoting entire weeks to televised sports, video games, and as much food and sex as they can muster, trying to offset a rough spot at work; I’ve taken it to a vicious cycle in the mind.

Escapism, as a thought process, has become so second nature to me that my mind voluminously wanders into visions of me at my best, my best foot forward as a husband, father, friend, brother and cousin. These are visions that are currently fictional. I am picturing myself doing things that I know I can do. I’ve done them before. I envision myself doing new things, unique things, groundbreaking, life-altering things. I know I can accomplish those. Yet, all of a sudden, that vision feels like enough. I’m not actually performing, instead accessing the ideas more frequently as if the ideas alone could have a direct impact on building a better life. The sequences play over and over in my head and I oddly derive pleasure from them as I would from screening a blockbuster summer film or going to a concert. It seems like me and my psyche have comfortably jumped to the false conclusion that like other escapist devices, I can access this “best me” readily. As quickly as I might reach for a video game controller, so too can I change overnight into the best husband I can be. Well, what are the odds of that? Grabbing the controller is near zero effort. Being the best husband I can be, never-ending, prioritized, altruistic effort, a drastic change to contributions tomorrow that I’m not even remotely making today. The video game eventually gets shut off. The best me cannot. The best me shut off a long time ago and, apart from elevating awareness via this blog, look at the horrible place I took it to.

Sure, some might contend that even this lesser version of me is somehow better than the bests of select others, but it’s not about comparisons. It’s about selfhood. In losing track of my best, I lose my identity and with that go my roles, my relationships, and my destiny. I share because I think a lot of people may actually be experiencing something similar and I would ask for your personal advice. As a self-proclaimed deep thinker, I’d hoped that mere acknowledgment of what I was going through would help to overcome it. Hence far, that’s proven not the case against this particular malaise.

My search, though still in its infancy, has revealed to me the concrete necessity of motivators. Knowing what needs to be done cannot lead to accomplishment in the absence of working motivators. And therein lies the defeatist in me. I look and I look and I look and while I am astonishingly impassioned to be my best version of a husband, to be my best version of a father, as of yet I find nothing that honestly motivates my needed change. I haven’t found a one that works for me anymore. I currently experience more motivation to escape to the mental images of my top notch self than to become that self. It’s slowly killing me.

It’s intriguing to note that our free society’s continued push to further define and acknowledge commonalities shared by all citizens somehow fails to consider any basic traits deemed negative by that same society. Confusion is among these. After all, even the most practiced thinkers cannot claim to have escaped the occasional state of outright confusion. Being confused is a trait we all share.

I suspect we ignore this widely shared facet of the human condition, perhaps, because it contains little or no legislative value. Seriously, how would society benefit from, say, a “right to be confused?” No, confusion gets dismissed by philosophers and logicians alike and we carry that “permission” to dismiss it very deeply into our everyday lives. We ignore the concept of confusion, even fear it, fear how we might be freshly perceived if suddenly caught in a moment of confusion. Will it ruin all after hopes of a fruitful career? Will our friends abandon us if they find us to be confused more often than not? Will adversaries use such moments as opportunities to pounce? The sometimes paralytic fear of even acknowledging this common, nascent brain response leads otherwise smart people to sit in ignorant silence rather than simply posing questions to navigate themselves into the know.I, for one, think it is beneficial to examine confusion, at least as much as it is to examine any play of the mind. Doing so is not an easy task. Examination is a cerebral undertaking and by common definition confusion is exactly when such mental efforts fail any demarcation of sense. How do you employ a technique to examine a state wherein that very technique must be absent? Dissecting confusion, one gets the feel of an “X” that cannot be solved for in an equation. The “X” gets moved around, back and forth, as different techniques are applied to either side of the formula, still ultimately resulting in a function of “X,” rather than any new or exact knowledge about the value of “X” itself. Confusion, like the unknown, is a negative space in the thought process, most difficult to penetrate. It is like trying to study pure chaos.

Since appropriately penetrating confusion on its own terms, then, is unlikely if not impossible, I start right at the edge of the issue, the brink. I consider the cause(s) of confusion. It is possible to derive at least part of the nature of confusion by examining its causes. In my own attempt, I’ve noted that the many causes I can identify tend to fit into two major categories, which implies then that there might be two (or more) different types of confusion.

Common ConfusionFirst, there is the confusion precipitated when the presented information is too new or too plentiful to process. In a sense, this is when the subject matter is “above” us, “over our heads.” There is often an unacknowledged, educational gap between what we know on a topic and what a speaker knows on that topic.

This is confusion in our animal sense. Examine a wolf being systematically thwarted off by ranchers. That wolf might “smartly” learn to avoid tire tracks, fences, daylight raids, learning ever more in its collected associations to humankind. But when the effort to thwart is concerted and suddenly the wolf is faced with the sound of loud gunfire and engines from multiple directions, its practiced mental and physical behaviors get befuddled. The wolf might dart right and left for short sprints, freeze, growl, run toward the noise. It can exhibit unpredictable, confused behavior. We suffer this as well. We share this brand of confusion with much of the animal kingdom. When faced with possible danger for, perhaps, the first time in one’s life, many of our reactions directly and immediately contradict not only our own practiced behaviors, but also the most reasonable escape tactics. It is why we have self-defense classes, to train our bodies and minds to overcome that particular neurological short circuit.

Confusion in a conversation or debate, when lives are not on the line, can still be a direct outgrowth of this blitzed string of behaviorally questionable reactions. We relate our understanding of the world around us to self-preservation because we see ourselves as more than the physical. We define the self as a deeper set of intangible qualities, among them our ability as humans to be smart. In absence of that understanding, we feel threatened. We can get threatened by people smarter than us. Presented with a subject which we’ve never before examined or hearing the subject communicated in a poor or contradictory manner, our thoughts can race all around for an explanation, sometimes so wildly that we freeze up, shut down, retreat, or check out of the dialogue. Neurologically, this is little different from mammalian fear response, synapses firing in brand new, overproduced fashions processing so many possible courses of action at once that none are mindfully prioritized as the best solution. We get stuck. We simply fear appearing to others as stupid and in our reaction to that fear we stop listening, stop learning. It is easier in the moment to “conclude” that figuratively sticking our heads in the sand will do a better job of preserving the self than to acknowledge our own confusion and better the self, long term, by choosing to learn from what another has to offer. This is undoubtedly the most common form of confusion both because no one is exempt from their animal origins and because of the high frequency with which EVERYBODY experiences being the lesser knowledgeable participant on any number of given topics.

Thinkers' Confusion

The second, lesser evident cause of confusion seems to be of a more elusive nature. It is a more mature classification of confusion that, while it exists, lies beyond the purely animal and reactionary form described above. After all, there exist precepts, as in sociology, that describe the evolution of human intellect as being, in some ways, a developmental measure to counteract instinct. That is the seemingly material purpose of human thought…overcoming, overcoming all. So, it’s reasonable to assume, then, that humans have a commonplace capacity to even overcome their own animal confusion.

Humans, through choice and effort, can mature to a point where they do not fear sounding silly, losing face, impacting their social reputation. They can develop into an arena of thought wherein, while still learning, they are fully comfortable with openly exploring and expressing why they, themselves, might be incorrect. They do not fear attracting a stupidity label while expressing thoughts or questions because those thoughts, those ideas, are seen as entities unto themselves, not part of the mind, the soul, the self. Ideas and knowledge are out there, cycling through the human condition free of charge. They are fruits of humanity ready to be plucked and gathered, but never viscerally owned by any one person or another. Knowledge can be shared, perhaps it can only be shared, and those who come to understand this possibility can pattern their mindsets in distinct opposition to animal confusion. They openly risk revealing their intellect as wanting at every turn so as to gain an even minutely greater perspective in the exchange.

Make no mistake. When I identify persons practicing the free abandon of any concern over labels, I do not include those who’ve done so through reckless abandon, people who care little about what others think, but who allow their perspective to stop at that one, solitary conclusion. We’ve generational throngs of non-thinkers and immature thinkers who isolate themselves from new ideas, constructive concepts, and assertions over which they’ve long ago decided they’ll not entertain any further input. These are folks who’ve passively identified the richness to be found in a fearless intellect, but who do little or none of the work to arrive there. They hide behind the sometimes righteous, but always too convenient notion that they need not at all concern themselves with what others think of them. Certainly, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conduct one’s life structured to please all peers. I’m no advocate of allowing others to define you. However, this be-all, end-all refuge stated as, “Why should I care what anyone else thinks of me?” all too often gets misapplied. It is wielded as license to ignore others, to dismiss their perspectives, to disallow contradictory thought or superior arguments from creeping into one’s view of the world. They view their idea as their possession, their own, part of the self while others who perceive ideas as free-for-all pose a threat to that comparatively myopic existence. The conscious practice of ignorance fails any measure of maturity.

To illustrate this second type of confusion, I am instead grouping together thinkers who’ve so often put themselves upon the riskier path of looking foolish in mere hopes of widening their intellectual experience, that they’ve completely desensitized themselves to any embarrassment involved with “sounding stupid.” These are the folks who’ve walked the mental walk, long term, as opposed to those who’ve shut off in a single, uninformed decision. They’ve matured so far through inevitable animal confusion that they’ve ceased to experience it without navigating through to new understanding. They will continue to come across that animal confusion. There will always be another person with newer or greater, even contradictory information to offer. Yet they’ve managed to separate out any mammalian fear response from their reaction to that broader insight. The synapses do not short circuit or fail to prioritize. Instead, these listeners build bridges of understanding. Asking questions and taking all answers at face value, they learn when unprepared, when unready. Particularizing each sequence of challenge and response until such time as they can properly assimilate the external information into a furtherance of their own global comprehension, these mature thinkers persist and probe, revel and celebrate, laud the very ideas that would otherwise put them to shame.

This mental practice, however, comes not without its price. For while the mature thinkers of this persuasion look ever onward and actually seek out those with knowledge superior to their own (most new and desired confusions now proving barely a bump in the road to broader understanding), these same persons inexorably alienate themselves from droves of very smart people who cannot make the same leap. A line is unwittingly drawn in the sand. Their own personal development is separatist in nature. They’ve ascended to a thought process in which many others either cannot or will not engage. It is from this delineated talent pool that we create experts, innovators, and world-bettering deciders. This “club” is not exclusive to notable names either. There is no PhD. required. Anyone, any person who both remains on this expansive mental journey and simply dedicates time to thinking, to observation, to experimentation, to questions, to challenges, to enrichment, to research, to balance, to fact, to expression, to debate, anyone can share in that enlightenment. Everyone thinks. But as a group, these better practiced thinkers tend to be viewed as the smartest among us. They are those we’d ask advice, those whose warnings we’d heed. They are the people we look to for inspiration and the ones whose answers we most trust.

So what is the second type of confusion? If these thinkers are so mature, so “unaffected” by animalistic bewilderment, so equipped to envelop information provided by thinkers who’ve surpassed even them, what could possibly send such minds reeling? The second grade of confusion stems from the comparatively uniformed assertions offered by those who could not make the cognitive leap. Grouped together, broad thinkers are collectively geared toward expanding their existing comprehension, changing perception to fit what they cannot disprove in the moment. As a group, however, they are often bereft of the tools best used to properly address a lesser informed viewpoint. By their very defined drive, the expansive thinkers must always presume that newly encountered information can lead to betterment, that their understanding can somehow be expanded to fit the novel data. The source of the information is less relevant. So, ironically, the truer thinker is veritably forced to, at least momentarily, treat morons on an equal par with geniuses. They must treat all speakers in between as if that invisible line in the sand represents nothing. Such a brief necessity frequently causes a type of confusion all its own.

It means that any human being offering information unfamiliar to the expansive thinker can insert even the smallest, completely fictional detail into an exchange and the broad thinker must then expansively re-examine everything s/he has ever come to know in attempts to impactfully comprehend the unfounded comment without dismissing it out of hand. The comment is an unintended monkey wrench. The less factual the detail, the greater the confusion. Hard core, proven, practiced knowledge-bases within the broader thinker’s repertoire are self-challenged, circling through proof after proof, example after example, modifier after modifier, trying to locate and explain the very legitimacy that the speaker could not lend his/her own comment. Broad thinkers must presume they’ve missed something in their growth and find all the indicated holes in some Swiss cheese upbringing. Yes, the thinker can engage in a line of questioning to navigate through as before, but what is mentally blueprinted as a through line to greater wisdom, in this case goes instead through to acknowledging the information as false. Immature thinkers dismiss. Mature thinkers disprove.

So there are, at least, two kinds of confusion. The first, a generalized, animal reaction to what we do not understand. The second, a cognitive attempt to navigate through the maze of our own examined comprehension to a new, suggested exit that does not exist. All humans have the capacity to experience both forms, but only a select group will journey far enough to recognize the difference between the two.

What To Do With Confusion

Why is it important to break up the subject of confusion in this way? Inappropriately, the instilling of confusion in a debate, disagreement, or argument is often used as a tactic. It is presumed that confusion is an equalizer, that it is a shared and useful tool in absence of some rule or etiquette against it. The presumption goes, if you are confused, all you need do to end the argument is to confuse the other person as well. The presumption furthers, if you hold your own and confuse your opponent, you win. Explaining the duality of confusion reveals this commonplace presumption as incorrect. It shows that one side of a disagreement can be severely lesser examined, lesser informed, and lesser justified despite that point’s asserter being able to momentarily confuse a contravening speaker. It emphasizes that just as one noted expert should be given far more attention on his/her studied subject than the lodger of a random opinion, so too should the expert’s brief confusion, if present, be regarded with far less importance than a similar moment of pause on the part of someone whose failed to fully explore the content.

It is a hierarchy. One form of confusion clearly trumps the other and is not nearly the “gotcha” that we presume it to be. Think this is a matter for formalized debate? Think again. Allowing plenty of room for multiple perspectives to be of simultaneous merit, how often does any disagreement in the home, the office, or everyday life pit two fighters of perfectly equal mental adept (on a subject) against each other? Rarely, if ever. That said, two narrow thinkers might never reach agreement, arguments ending in a huff. Two broad thinkers might always reach agreement, both prepped to find resolution and understanding. A narrow thinker versus a broad thinker might instead keep the debate rolling forward forever, the former constantly hoping to gain that elusive and everlasting win by tripping up the latter through means of tactic over content. Sorry, small minds. You can lose out even to sheer confusion.

There were fifty or so at the party, milling about and muted beneath the amplified throb that passed for music. Dimmed lights, the faint odor of liberated alcohol left sitting, countless accidents waiting to happen, and he saw none of it. The front door hadn’t even swung its intended arc when there she sat, spotted, three steps up the curved staircase, a full head and shoulders above anyone else, and auburn ringlets snapping and rebounding each time she enlivened her delicate brow about the room in hopes that something spectacular was soon to happen.

One comely moon disappearing beyond a diminished fete and still the new couple sat entwined in words as if their magic stretched no further than that landing. They’d talked and connected deeply while the clocks had spun time away. He’d never given much importance to words, opting on the regular for a “thing” or a “whatever” to reach conversation’s end, but tonight was an endless vesper. Suddenly the less practiced notions of attraction spilt from his taut heart in perfect words that drew in all her pristine attention. Compliment rained down upon compliment, each one more examined than the last, as “beauty” turned to “dazzling” and as fleeting instances where he’d toss out a “cherish” or a “marvel” would set their stage for forever.Romantic, first chance meetings are the stuff of personal legend and to try to bare down on them as a whole using common sense or logic is to squelch the very rare flickers of a dream world present on this more concrete Earth. By all means, give these moments their due in the human condition. Try hard to refrain from examining them away.

Still, I do find it rather curious that of all the “lines” and “words” carefully dropped into such seminal encounters, that attraction by means of intellect is now so often voiced and uniquely done so in the form of an untruth. Traditionally, these bulk expressions of attraction, be they keyed to potential love or momentary lust, almost always have to do with at least somewhat honest statements about why one person desires another person’s company. As a fly on the wall, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear mention made of a woman’s beauty, a man’s physique, a person’s tenderness, insight, point of view, choice of attire, listening skill, understanding, commonalities. If one truly observes these utterances, there is nearly always an element of truth to them. For the couples that last, those truths tend to last with them, in one form or another.

My generation has added “intellect” to that list. We are no strangers to sentences like, “Smart is sexy,” or, “I am really turned on by his mind.” Yes, there’s a gender bias frequently at work there, one group speaking it more than the other. Yes, at one time in the distant past, these were default utterances conjured to find a nice way to justify one’s attraction to a less than traditionally attractive individual. Nonetheless, flies looking in hear this more and more and along with it the evident desire for those sentences to be just as true as all the other attractors.

Sadly, I think it is not. Yes, intellect is a very powerful motivator toward coupling at the outset, especially if each person’s degree of intellect is on a similar par. But long term, the very intellect that supposedly attracted you in the first place cannot stand the test of couplehood without overcoming serious drawbacks. That is to say that the very noticeable intellect that once put a person into your “until death do us part” sites, will almost inexorably be the device through which you are frequently shown to be wrong, incorrect, silly, uninformed, lacking in wisdom, unexamined, unsure, unaware, less educated, or otherwise cerebrally wanting. No one wishes to choose a lifetime of provably, second best decisions.

Sure, no one person is going to be correct all of the time, but if you knew you were going to have to throw in the towel in debates, say, 80 percent of your life, would you choose that willingly? Of course not. Love might overcome all, but a perpetual back seat on the reason bus can make of that love a very uncomfortable predestined marginalization.Your initial attraction to your potential partner’s “intellect” is likely a misnomer, an observation put in place of some other attractor that for some embarrassing or selfish reason you cannot bring yourself to admit. Sure, the presence of a practiced intellect does not mean that it will necessarily be lauded over one’s partner, used to pick arguments or create win-lose scenarios. A true intellect is one that cherishes the many varied facets of couplehood. Yet, if you are enlightened enough to be honestly “turned on” by mental prowess, a partner who’d then refrain from exercising it to keep the relationship peace is:

a) not the person you fell in love withb) not a person you would be as attracted toc) a lesser person than s/he can bed) an individual who is forced to lie to you so that you can think you’ve gotten the upper hand

There are many ways for intellect to be repulsive. Some very heady figures have been the core causes of global atrocities throughout history. We all know someone who speaks as if they are presumed smarter than everyone around them. Logic to the exclusion of the human condition doesn’t sit well in most conversations. In my opinion, however, these are not true intellects. They are disgusting downward social spirals that masquerade under the label “intellect,” tarnishing the beauty of what they can never fully understand.

Instead, I think the greatest repulsiveness sourced from the presence of impressive thought is one that hammers true intellect with a baseline untruth. It is this well-meaning, yet ultimately unintuitive notion that one finds intellect attractive enough to mention. That’s a sound bite, a line, a feel good expression that fills an awkward pause when your own mind draws a blank. This observation, even if true in the moment, can be viewed as the epitome of false come-ons as both love-seekers struggle to put a best dating foot forward. To say so is to leave unexamined what that mentionable thinking differential means for your future, unwittingly revealing you as a person who values something that you must not have. So, the supposed intellectual that falls for it is more of an egotist than a thinker. The thinker who recognizes the phrase for what it is, on the other hand, has little choice but to conclude you to be a veritable slouch in the brains department. Would you desire a relationship with either of these types? Bring not upon yourself this falsehood that dooms relationships. Find ways to appreciate intellect that are truthful, ways that are certainly far afield from animal attraction.

I never grew attached enough to the apartment that I rent to refer to it with a tricky tongue. I don’t call it a domicile or dwelling, even in jest. I barely utter the lighter words “my place” or “home.” Attaching these ideas to my over-priced and under-modernized unit just seems too permanent, as if the words themselves could wash away all hopes of future homeownership or dreams of one day retiring to an outdoor area with greater square footage than a shoe.

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that it is this very apartment that my miraculous daughter will always know as her first home. She came to us, what seems like yesterday, more beautiful than autumn dusk and as smart as those who’d stop to ponder it, sprouting all her roots here as she instantaneously shot up to age two. And it is in this crumbling box that doubles as her perfect castle that we together might never have a fruitful dialogue on thoughts if I should fail to make time to think. What I think about today is this veritable cubicle with closets and how, while it may have perturbed me before, I dislike it anew for calling my parenthood into question.We’ve a city. There are door locks. Ours are many, five if you total entryway and apartment. Enter the landlord with all good intensions and a Stanley screwdriver, adding a sixth lock to the storm door, free of charge and without a request to do so. Safety six, convenience zero; I can now get to the second story roof of my building more easily than I can get from my porch to my kitchen.

Pure force of habit drove me to initially overlook the new lock, leaving it unclasped more than once. And while we as a family were no less safe than the day before lock six had joined the keychain puzzle, my “mistake” somehow sanctioned a multidirectional barrage of snide commentary. “You musts,” and “Don’t forgets,” and “How could yous,” and “That’s irresponsibles” flurried down on me like my own personal ticker tape parade of shame. The neighbor, the landlord, the mother, the landlord’s spouse, the friend, the friend of the friend, the dumpster-diving passer-by; they all precipitated a collective onus in attributing an importance to that quarter inch keyhole and verbally flailing me for dismissing the same.

That ambient yapping was easy enough to ignore. I was aware of my “oversight” and actively trying to change my behavior. Plus, most of the reasons offered as to why “I must” lock the new lock sounded little more than, “Because it’s a lock. That’s what locks do.”

They weren’t thinking. I really wasn’t thinking. Had it stopped there, I’d have nothing to contribute to a blog about mature thought. Then the nightmares started.

For my part, I was soon tackling the subject solo. It doesn’t take a complex game of word association to understand how my mind went from lock to security, security to crime, crime to worst case scenario. If ever you plan to be a new parent, any parent, I suggest you take an active mental hiatus from working worst case scenarios into your thought process. The imagery your own mind can muster is horrifying enough, no less the knowledge that real life acts matching that imagery are how locks leapt onto doors in the first place, warranted or not. Yet as horrifying as those mental flashes were, nothing prepared me for what I’d thought of next.

While I believe it best never to blame oneself for another person’s misdeeds, I suddenly realized that I truly don’t know what I would do if ever horror visited our “home” after I had locked all, but that final lock. That lock could be the deterrent. That last lock could have bought time enough to make a difference. The jiggle at that lock could be the one that would wake me or the task that would re-time an intruder’s entrance to police patrols. That lock, in essence of the self, could be loosely viewed, with no crime committed, as the mindful difference between a good parent and a bad one.

So it begs the thinker’s question, where does it end? If the landlord decides to put 38 locks on the door, am I a bad parent if I only lock 37 of them? I think most people would say, “no,” but post emergency, I would know, very clearly, that I didn’t do EVERYTHING I could have to prevent disaster. I’m well aware and in full acceptance of the notion that a crook unstopped by 10 locks is unlikely to be deterred by an 11th. Yet, while that would seem to place full fault squarely upon the deviant, I ask if there wouldn’t be a small portion of that fault that would factually be my own. Perhaps that small portion is not fault, but simply contribution. I might never cognitively or emotionally reconcile my contribution of ignoring any one lock. Sure, mathematically, my contribution reads less and less with every extra lock we add to the equation, but where is the threshold? At what point can an emotionally mature individual determine through all acceptable measures that one step shy of X is prudent, but one beyond is overkill?

I refer to the elusive nature of this presumably common sense threshold in our thinker’s question as “propulsive morality.” I choose the phrase because it illustrates how the internal and external measures of ethic are stretched ever outward, like an unending and irreversible vector away from manageable criteria into the chaotically complex through a practiced compulsion to add a theoretical plus one. “Propulsive morality,” by whatever name, exists and is problematic at its core. It seems to snake through culture generationally, perhaps spurred on by litigation, politicking, propaganda, poor forensic practice, isolationism, nihilism, cognitive lock, oppression, reality television, psychological scotomata, or immaturity.

Let’s examine. “Propulsive morality” first presumes that a given situation (five locks) succeeds at an agreeable measure of ethic so long as any arguably mitigating addition to that situation (a sixth lock) remains theoretical. In this state, both parties seem to be on common ground and therefore each can be egalitarian in her/his treatment of the other. “You lock all your locks regularly. Great!” However, that mutual nicety is subject to an enormous loophole. Whereupon two or more parties start such agreement in theory, it takes only a single individual to later physically and autonomously add in the formerly theoretical next step. “We agreed on that yesterday, yes, but I just added this new lock and you should see it my way now too. You’d be wrong not to use it” Parties never require of themselves the related compromise defining a needed threshold, a distant point down the chain of their new disagreement that would once again bring them together, both acquiescing that a tiny step further would prove ridiculous or needlessly redundant. So, with that personal requirement absent, loose judgments are given license to propel and propel, ad infinitum, until a negative aspersion can be cast. As a missile can seek heat, “propulsive morality” seeks disparagement. It stretches as far as it must to reach its predestined marginalization and thereafter frames the breadth of that stretch, falsely, as an effort comparable to hard core logic.

The aspersions come from others, yes, predominantly, but can also wind their way into the psyche when one takes stock in oneself, sometimes for no other reason that the fact that, perhaps, no one has pointed out this flawed practice to the thinker.

What I, here, am calling, “propulsive morality” seems to warrant this potent a description as such disconcerting words are only a fraction of the lasting, negative impact that can be experienced each time this default “methodology” is employed. I may have simply taken note, egotistically, as I would a pet peeve, and tried to coin a phrase to describe it. Yet, I am certain there are philosophy experts, psychologists, and ethicists out there who can offer great insight on what it is that I am describing. Perhaps the practice already has a name with great study devoted to it; but try cross-referencing my meager description in a search engine or card catalog. I do not share the vocabulary of established social sciences.

Locks-wise, legally, I’m covered. Culpability aptly befalls a theoretical intruder. Ethically? I’m not exactly certain. I, myself, would judge me as a bad parent if I had regularly forced my daughter to miss just one meal a day, despite feeding her all the others. I, myself, would judge me as a bad parent if I let her stew in a dirty diaper just once a day, despite changing all the others. Why not the sixth lock? The thirty-eighth? Bars? A handgun? A shotgun? A force field? No. Until I hunt down and assimilate greater insights from those studied on the subject, all my locks get locked, all the time, no matter how plentiful, no matter how redundant or inconvenient. It serves my notions of fatherly responsibility, of course. However, that decision also thrusts me into this undefined mind game where I need play along, endlessly, despite the fact that I disagree. I’m sorry, but when do we take stock in the danger of that level of compromise? Is it more dangerous to my daughter that a sixth of six locks not get clasped on occasion, or that she might learn from me the less than artful life lesson of giving-in? I’m guessing that mature minds would view the latter as more impactful, agreeing on substance. Yet, if the latter is “in fact” more dangerous to her, why then does a good parent label get lent to the giving-in, and a bad parent label to the person who questions how far compromise should reach?

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. - Albert EinsteinThe weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. - Mahatma GandhiDialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. - Theodor Adorno